


The sounds of life

by firecrackerx



Series: Sounds of Life [1]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 02:30:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2491136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecrackerx/pseuds/firecrackerx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura Hollis discovers navigating the beginning of an interspecies relationship and its boundaries is awkward. Set at some point in the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The sounds of life

Laura has been listening to people's bodies. 

Their very flesh, she imagines, is alive. When she is around other people she can almost hear it. She just leans slightly towards them and her mind plays tricks on her. At first she only did it when she remembered her new obsession, this recent fixation with finding life in every person, every bug, every blade of grass. But now she does it without realizing it. Perry looked at her funny earlier when she ambushed her in the corridor and tried to push a tupperware with some 'proper food to feed yourself for once' into her hands, with LaFontaine sighting softly a few steps behind her. Laura had accepted it with a half-frozen smile and then, just like that, she had found herself leaning slightly towards the floor don, head tilted. Perry's left eyebrow had arched slowly. Laura had muttered her thanks and made a hasty escape, leaving Perry and LaFontaine looking at each other puzzled. 

Carmilla's body is not alive. Of course she has known that for a long time, but it's hard to accept that she is, well, _dead_. Once you get used to the fact that someone is a vampire and the initial shock wears off, remembering they are technically dead while they walk around is complicated. Carmilla's body has ways to hide it, too. There is, for example, the faint pink in her face after she's fed. The soft rise and fall of the chest. The little tics and gestures that Laura is convinced came from Carmilla's brief youth and still slip in her every day life, unnoticed. 

When she arrives to their room, still embarrassed from her encounter with Perry and LaFontaine, Carmilla is sleeping with her face down against the pillow. She is so pale, so still. She doesn't even look like she is breathing. Laura steps close and listens, one ear almost touching the bare skin right below Carmilla's neck, and there is nothing there but silent flesh and cold skin. It makes her muscles tight and her mind reel; the air in the room comes alive with the eerie electricity of the unfamiliar. Laura has to repeat to herself that everything is alright to avoid shaking Carmilla awake. She steps back and focuses on the food Perry has given her, finds a spot in the fridge to store it, drinks two glasses of water. Her instincts need time to adjust, she thinks. Time to adjust and learn what her mind and heart already know. Just a matter of time. Just a matter of sharing space.

And yet, the silent flesh haunts her. 

Maybe that is the reason an idea blooms and bubbles in her mind all morning, boiling under her thoughts while she writes her essays, goes to class and returns to her room for lunch. By the time she steps inside she has talked herself into doing something possibly reckless and her stomach feels like a tight knot. 

"Hey, cutie."

Carmilla is, uncharacteristically, sitting on her bed with eyes half closed when it's barely afternoon. Avoiding her eyes, Laura opens the fridge and surveys the contents before taking Perry's food out and placing it by the cookies.

"Are you alright?"

"Good morning to you too," she growls. "Just hungry. Too hungry. I'll be back in no time to sleep some more."

"Wait, I have to talk to you..."

"Can't. Feed, then talk," she kneels on the floor, looking for her left boot under the bed. 

"I want to do it!"

Carmilla looks at her, all messy hair and confusion:

"...what?"

"Stay with me. And let's... eat together. Alright?"

After a moment of hesitation Carmilla sits on her bed again, this time with her back against the wall. Laura takes a deep breath, eats a cookie and starts reheating the food, an amount of creamy pasta that could probably feed a little army. Carmilla yawns from her bed: 

"Where did all that stuff come from?"

"Perry insisted." 

"I see. This is going to be quite the romantic lunch."

Laura tries to not to picture it, clears her throat and the silence around them thickens. When she steals a look towards Carmilla she can read in the pallor of her skin how much she really needs to feed, but looks away promptly when the vampire catches her looking.

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Positive," she nods, taking the third cookie.

"Because you look more jumpy than convinced to me..."

"I am resolved."

"Very well... You should stop eating those cookies."

"Hey!" Laura spins, pointing a wooden spoon at her. "We may be dating and I might just have offered for you to bite me, but that doesn't mean you have a say in what I eat! I don't care how," Laura drops her voice to imitate Carmilla, " _sickly sweet_ you thought it was the first time! Is that clear?"

Carmilla sighs silently as Laura grabs a handful of cookies and pushes them in her mouth with a belligerent look. 

"I meant because you are going to eat a mountain of pasta now..." she says, fighting a smile at the sight of Laura's frown over her stuffed cheeks. "But now that you mention it, it is true that you taste like something out of a candy factory."

Carmilla looks mildly entertained by Laura's efforts to chew and swallow and by her chagrined expression, but it soon gets silent again as Laura takes the plate to her own bed and sits cross-legged, facing Carmilla. Some romantic lunch this is, she thinks as they look into each other's eyes.

"So we are going to do this," says Carmilla.

"Yes." 

Silence. The metallic sound of the fork as she abandons it on the plate.

"I need to know how it is, and possibly..."

"Possibly?"

"Do it regularly."

"You know I have my ways, you don't need to get involved. And besides," she pauses, "you already know how it is."

"But it must be different if you do it properly, for sure?" she asks, leaving the plate on the desk.

"Oh, so it was not proper enough for you?"

"Well, you were in a hurry and I was not prepared for the fact that you were going to feast on my jugular. At all. It must be different if we just... take our time, if I know what's coming, right?"

"...right. It's still going to hurt, though."

"If it's utterly unpleasant, I won't ask again. I mean, if it's utterly unpleasant again."

There's a moment, a strangely disappointing moment, when Laura sees Carmilla look down and thinks she will say no. She sees her lick her pale and dry lips, rubbing her hands slowly, deep in thought. But she finally looks up and nods once. Laura takes a deep breath. Her beds have never seem so far away as she leaves her own and approaches Carmilla's, hesitating a moment before climbing on it and straddling her thighs. She sweeps her hair away from her neck, nervously:

"Is this ok, Carm?" she asks softly, the awkwardness of their young, uncertain relationship momentarily forgotten. 

Carmilla smiles and her hands wander over Laura's back and down until her fingers trace the lean curve of her hips. 

"Target a little high, but I will manage," she purrs.

"Oh! Sorry, I will lie down," she jumps away from Carmilla's lap before she can say anything and lies on her back quickly, stricking a rather theatrical pose. "We should be more comfortable like this... but, is there going to be spilled blood? Because we are going to get it everywhere like this... Wait, it absolutely won't be any spilled blood, right? Right? As in enough to actually stain clothes and be considered a considerable loss? No, no, of course not..."

Still sitting up, Carmilla looks at her waiting for another change of position that arrives a few seconds later, torn between letting her run out of questions and stopping her before her hunger gets too painful to handle with Laura so close. She finally grabs her by the hips when Laura is on her knees in the middle of the fourth change of strategic positioning and pulls her close. 

"Laura," she growls with her chest pressed against Laura's back. "As much as I appreciate what you are trying to do, it's obvious that you are not ready to do it. And I really, really..." 

"Yes!"

"What? What is it?" she says, wishing she could see her face.

"This is perfect! This is the right position!"

"Really? You want me to bite you like this? You've been watching too many vampire movies."

"No, I am totally serious. I am ready, there will be no blood stains on the bed, your mouth is... well... right at the same level as my neck is... so..." Laura moves back as best as she can, her hips fitting snugly between Carmilla's legs. "Go for it."

Carmilla's body has been growing cold with the need of blood and Laura's warmth against her chest makes her sigh. Laura reaches back to place a hand on Carmilla's knee and tilts her head to the side. She is ready, but there's still time to expect what is coming. Carmilla works slowly. The ghostly touch of her lips comes first, and then her arms around Laura's waist. 

It still hurts. There's a sting of sharp pain and her hand closes over Carmilla's knee, but it's not as bad as she remembers. In the silence of the room she hears the primitive noises of feeding, something she definitely didn't hear the first time. The mouth on her neck tries to be gentle, but the hands roaming over her thighs are needy, like Carmilla's hips pressing hard from behind her and her irregular intakes of breath. Laura closes her eyes and her whole being is incandescent sensation.

At the end there is some awkwardness when Carmilla moves her mouth away with a delicate gesture almost bizarre after the long minutes of feeding. Laura presses a hand to her neck and turns to look at her with a little smile, but Carmilla is hiding her face with a hand and trying to clean her lips with the other, trying to move away and face the wall. Laura's smile fades. Carmilla has never looked so animalistic and at the same time so frail. Laura fights the urge to embrace her, but gets up from the bed and brings back some kleenex from the desk instead. She offers them without a word and Carmilla accepts one demurely.

"See?" says Laura gently, pressing one to her neck. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"Shouldn't I be the one saying that?" Carmilla's voice trembles slightly when she turns to face Laura, recovering from her moment of vulnerability. 

"Please, like I didn't know who was more chicken about this whole thing," she smiles. Carmilla drags the kleenex over her mouth looking embarrassed, but she manages a smile too. Laura notices her lips are looking a little less dry already.

 

Carmilla reads the rest of the afternoon, too full of blood to sleep, and finally goes back to bed later that evening. Laura works well past that time until she is tired and stretches on her chair, feeling the memory of pain on her neck. The wound is smaller and less messy than the last one, but the skin feels warm and tender around it. She turns off the computer, gets her bed ready and then stops by Carmilla's, just like she did a few hours ago, that very morning. She bends once more, pressing an ear against her back. Laura is sure her mind is deceiving her again, but for a moment she can hear the softest, weakest pulse, the faint rush of the blood, the sounds of life almost imperceptible. She feels her throat getting tight and keeps listening, not minding if real or imagined, to the sounds of her life pulsating inside Carmilla until all she can hear is her own heart beating wildly in her chest. With careful movements so as not to disturb her, she slips in Carmilla's bed and clings to her back with a satisfied smile. They'll definitely do it again, perhaps even a few times every month.

She's not giving up the cookies, though.


End file.
